At the end of a book tour, rosy thoughts don’t come naturally. You’re alternating between an audience of ten or one hundred, a sense of giddiness and futility. You’ve searched for your novel in airport bookstores, handled reader questions about your use of the wrong car model, introduced yourself to people you’ve met before. You’d ideally be placed in suspended animation for the first six months to avoid wondering about sales, or to prevent futilely searching for your name on one list or another, trying to reinflate your ego for another event. You love your books but you’re sick of talking about yourself. 

And you answer awkward questions about how and why you began writing. I’ve gotten more of these questions than usual because I am actually publicizing five books—my earlier Jules Clement mystery novels have been reissued in tandem with The River View, and a twenty-year gap in the series brings up questions. In the interim, I published just two other, unrelated novels, The Widow Nash and The Center of Everything. What have I been doing; why did I stop and begin again? 

And so every Q & A becomes an encounter session, a low-key confessional about my creative existence. What upbeat spin could I put on a career that hasn’t been typical? And what is typical, anyway? 

I’ve published seven novels. I’ve written two more, as well as several screenplays, a dozen treatments, and some stray short stories. This sounds good as an outline, less joyous in its particulars. I feel largely at peace with my writing life now, but if you’d told me it would go this way thirty years ago, I’d have been hysterical with dread. No young, earnest writer, whether applying for graduate school or working on a novel between shifts in a diner, would want my story, would want their professional life to go my way. We all make it up as we go along, but this wasn’t a path, it was a tumble, career as wave action, survival as witless heroism. 

I didn’t plan to be a writer. My father, Jim Harrison, was a poet and a novelist. He’d been born with a true calling, an essential combination of talent, obsession and arrogance. I didn’t have the passion, and I’d grown up with a first-hand knowledge of what a terrible way it was to make a living. I worked in restaurants through college, got an English degree, catered and worked at Dean & Deluca in New York City before stints in magazines, freelance editing and reading scripts for an actor-producer. In my late twenties, I abandoned this last well-paying job and fled to Montana, where I was lucky enough to end up running a small, nationally respected press. We published twenty-some books before we ran out of money and closed down. I was thirty-two, with a three-year-old son, in a small town where the hourly wage at the local newspaper or at any secretarial job was about $3.50. 

Out of a job, in extremis, I fell back on a known world, kind of like a plumber’s daughter who retreats to the family trade when medical school proves to be too expensive. I decided to write a novel. Writing was something I knew. I’d watched it happen, shepherded manuscripts to creation, read thousands of very good books. I’d written captions for magazines and coverage for screenplays, catalogue copy for a mail-order food catalogue, interviews with starlets and randy actors. At twelve, with a friend, I’d written a blood-soaked play; ten years later, with the same friend in a get-rich-quick scheme, one hundred pages of a bodice ripper which left the editor weeping with laughter at the sex scenes. It’s very hard to be earnest in that genre.

I had no intention of writing literary fiction, like my father (shoot me if I ever call myself an artist). I would try a mystery—a form I loved in all variations, Chandler to Sayers to Mosley to Mankell—and thought I could pull one off in the same way that I’d manage the stages of a complex recipe I’d never completely cooked before. And if I could succeed in the key unknown—did I actually have the chops to write something worth reading?—I knew an agent I might be able bully into submission. 

A favorite quote from Susan Choi: Writing is this weird cross of having a dream and fixing a car. As for the dream part of that quote: I found I loved making shit up, loved the family business. 

After a few drafts I signed a contract for two novels. I got good reviews, went on old-style tours. I signed to write another two, with grumbles from the publisher: couldn’t I write faster? I couldn’t—two kids by then, both with some health issues, and there were other family illnesses. I optioned the series three times; I wrote the film and television adaptions and other scripts for scale. Somewhere in there, my agent was verbally abusive on the phone with my editor, and I didn’t push hard enough for a full apology. I wasn’t earning out. We limped through the publication of the fourth mystery and I dropped out of any publishing pattern at all. Two years later, I sent my editor something new and good, something I thought she’d find exciting, and she blew me off with a one-line note. A few years after that, I tried another mystery, and gave it to a respected editor, who gave it to his usual reader, who hated it. 

And that was the end of that.

The American story—the American myth—is that things just keep getting better. The good writing luck—quite a bit of luck, period—left my life for the next fifteen years. I failed to sell two novels and multiple screenplays; my children lost three grandparents, their last two great-grandparents, and an uncle. The things that didn’t sell weren’t necessarily worse than what I’d published. I could blame the permanently enraged agent again for one failure, timing for another near miss, but it didn’t matter. 

The complicating problem with failure is that it really can be self-perpetuating. If you’re wounded, if you’re depressed, you don’t write as well, as fluidly and assuredly. If you think you can’t pull something off, you don’t reach and try. Or you try, but the effort is faltering.

And so on to other jobs, just like most other writers. I helped an actor through an endless autobiography and edited action novels for vain men. Surgeons and politicians seem to think they can do anything, but who was I to call anyone on arrogance. For a year of WGA benefits, I adapted a bigoted children’s book about Sacajawea—this was a decade before that overdue conversation—and turned in a draft the producers found too “realistic.” (They wanted a “nice” story.) I helped on a chef friend’s cookbook project and put in a year researching a documentary about the weird, wonderful city of Butte, Montana. And I eventually found a full-time job as a tech editor for archaeology and botany and wildlife reports. 

But once your brain changes, it’s not so easy to change it back. I thought in stories now. I really, really liked to write. 

What was I thinking of during that time? Let me tell you:

A novel about an Irish gardener who finds himself in Veracruz in 1848 that I wanted to call Green Seas.

A novel about the Russian mob and art theft called Joe’s Russian Gothic.

A nonfiction work about the two 19th-century mining engineers named William Ludlow. 

A treatment about a chef having a nervous breakdown (The Raw and the Cooked; this was in 1998, before Kitchen Confidential came out).

A novella about Walker Evans’ trip to Cuba in 1933 during the fall of Machado. 

A romantic comedy script about a runaway birder and a journalist called Birding. 

A treatment about a group of friends gambling in Montana in the late 1930s (essentially the backstory of one of my mysteries, An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence.)

A mystery about opiate smuggling and religion (Glass Eyes). 

A horror-fantasy treatment about children and dreams and Scythian graves, set on Long Island in the 1960s.

A story about chaperoning a young woman from Chicago to San Francisco after the Blackhawk War in the 1830s. 

A haunted house story called The Life of the Party. 

A short story about a girl with a dying father in Northern Michigan.

A treatment or maybe a novella about Prince Street in the 1980s, called Appetite.

A novel or novella with two characters from The Widow Nash: living in Los Angeles in 1920, in Spain in the 1930s, in French Catalonia just after World War II. 

I still love these stories. They are the lost lovers who remain alive in my head, and maybe that’s the point—I haven’t had to live with them for long, or in years. The unfinished thing is something that can still be perfect, a jewel that might blow the world’s mind. I still intend to write most of them despite their current half-baked state.

Another quote, from Iris Murdoch: Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.  

The point is not to stun with both stupidity and variety, to make anyone marvel at the range of my undiagnosed ADHD. And maybe most writers do this. Along the way, I could also provide a short history of my bad ideas: to give up writing the mysteries for a high-stakes (and losing) bet on scripts, to stick with my first agent, who ruined several relationships, and a producer who found me work but ruined several more. Not going back to school for a nursing degree when I was forty, and it first occurred to me. Continuing to act like everything was going to be fine.

But what is interesting, with some distance, is how much I’ve believed in each of these ideas—how much I still believe—and how much time went into each project, into the strange, complementary balance you can strike between research and inspiration. Birding was somehow an apology to my birder grandmother from a bird-blind granddaughter, and I spent months reading about rarities and migration and the species of (why?) Australia. For my 19th-century Irish boy in Green Seas, who I can still see lying on white sand, I read about the Irish penal laws, French universities that accepted Irish Catholics, the Wild Geese (Irish mercenaries), the great gardeners of the early nineteenth century, the politics of Napoleonic Mexico, the Mexican American War and the St. Patrick’s Battalion, the botanic garden of Veracruz, the sharp memory of things I’d seen on two trips to Ireland. For Joe’s Russian Gothic, art theft and forgery and a lot of wandering around the Lower East Side and Brighton Beach and Green-Wood Cemetery. 

For the cook story, pure, traumatized personal memory. For the dream story, textbooks and Archaeology magazines and the memory of being a child in a strange house. For Walker Evans, historical research, knowledge of the photos he took during the collapse of the Maduro regime, and one photobooth snapshot of the photographer with a young woman. For Prince Street, the memory of the early AIDs epidemic and time spent working at Dean & Deluca. For The Life of the Party, a catering past and a fear of drowning, 

You just never know where your brain will go. I don’t actually understand how people function without this kind of inner life. Quite well, obviously, but to each her own. 

My larger point is that nothing really goes to waste. That horrible night with the spins at age fourteen will pay off in a funny scene written when you’re sixty, trying to remember a raw, surreal hangover. A Sisyphean few months working on the memoir of an insane actor’s insane wife will make it into Appetite, especially the bits about getting her into and out of Bellevue. Polly in The Center of Everything is basically a character from Prince Street. My great-great grandfather Ludlow—Cornish orphan and mining engineer—became a syphilitic suicide named Walton Remfrey. I used some Russian thugs from the art theft novel in The River View, and a character named Henning in The Widow Nash also owes something to Joe. 

And the jobs you do to float your writing, just like almost every other ink-stained wretch, might steal time but enrich a novel down the line. My years at the doomed press were key to the first scene (an affectionate revenge sniping) in my first mystery, The Edge of the Crazies. Without working as a researcher for a documentary about Butte, I would never have found a context and a time for the basic story of The Widow Nash: a woman walks off a train in 1905 and disappears into a series of western cities. Without years as a kitchen drudge in restaurants and at high-end food stores, I would never have been able to write a dozen characters or scenes (I would also never have been able to feed myself in 1980s Montana). Working on archaeological, botanical, and wildlife reports widened my world. 

Writing might not be a living yet, but it’s still the way I love to live, and I have an abundance of luck: a great new agent, great editor, and great publisher have seen me through three new books and the reissue of the four old mysteries. 

I could tell another writer what not to do, career-wise. Don’t let your fictionalized memories cause unnecessary harm. Don’t shift life plans and enthusiasms like you’re a Stalin-era bureaucrat or a serial monogamist. Don’t work for sociopaths or try to reimagine Sacajawea if you’re a white girl from Michigan. Don’t think you don’t need editing. Don’t feel sorry for yourself; don’t give up.  

Above all: use everything.

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Jamie Harrison is the author of seven novels, including The River View, the most recent of her five Jules Clement mysteries; The Center of Everything; and The Widow Nash, winner of the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award, and a finalist for the High Plains Book Award. She’s lived in Livingston, Montana for almost forty years.